1974: A Personal History, by Francine Prose
Francine Prose married young, in her final semester at Radcliffe. The match was imperfect, and she and her husband both suffered. The cultural winds blew against them. The great music emerging from the car stereo was zero help. “The music we loved had come to seem like a reproach, a reminder: Someone is in love, but it isn’t you, and you will never feel like that again,” Prose writes in her new memoir, “1974: A Personal History.”
Monogamy, she adds, “seemed embarrassing, hopelessly square and old-fashioned. The culture encouraged, expected and all but insisted upon erotic restlessness. Sex was free; sex was everywhere, a source of wonder, pleasure and heat without the chilling effect of familiarity and repetition.”
Within three years she was divorced. By 1974, when she was 26, she was spending more time in San Francisco and less time in Cambridge, where she had been in graduate school. Out west, she felt unfettered and alive (she was a Joni Mitchell fan). She lived with a bohemian older couple. They all existed on good coffee and “avocado sandwiches on San Francisco sourdough bread with mayo, black pepper and alfalfa sprouts.”
That year, at a poker game in the apartment, she met Tony Russo. Along with Daniel Ellsberg, Russo leaked the Pentagon Papers, which laid bare America’s perfidy in Vietnam. Published in The New York Times in 1971, the papers, in Prose’s summary, “confirmed what the antiwar movement had never been able to prove: Our presence in Vietnam was unwanted. We’d committed war crimes.”
Russo was a countercultural and free-speech hero. He had spent 47 days in jail for refusing to testify against Ellsberg. He worked for NASA and later the RAND Corporation, where he was involved in a study of how Vietcong prisoners were interrogated, and some of their stories moved him deeply. By the time Prose met him, he was paranoid and unemployed. “An aura of unease surrounded him,” Prose writes, “the faint distressing buzz of an electrical panel with a burnt fuse and some wires pulled loose.”
Russo was charismatic, though, a Virginia-born charmer with a Southern accent. Prose had a thing for bad boys. Here was antiwar royalty. He was 10 years older. Before long they were riding around in his old, putty-colored Buick and talking all night, while he chain-smoked Camels.
Was it a love affair? Not quite. The sex was minimal and awkward. But there was something between them, if briefly, and that something is among the primary subjects of this memoir, which despite its darts of insight and many flashes of good writing remains lukewarm and distant. They didn’t know each other that well. Prose nonetheless hangs a great deal of her memoir on Russo and rehashes the well-known issues surrounding the Pentagon Papers themselves. Russo explains his past in long monologues.
There is more here. Prose is at work figuring out who she was in 1974, before she returned home to New York the following year. She writes, perceptively, “One danger of writing about yourself is that you may learn things about yourself that you don’t want to know.”
On the one hand, Prose was on the run from a borderline breakdown she’d had in Cambridge. She’d become an agoraphobe, unable to leave her apartment. She was fragile. Even thunderstorms threatened her sanity. She spent a lot of time consulting the I Ching. “I had absolutely no idea where I belonged in the universe or what I was going to do,” she writes. In her flight west she resembled a latter-day Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who moved to Pasadena from New England to recover from the postpartum depression she described in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892).
On the other hand, Prose seems to have been one of the great overachievers of her era. She had a coddled upbringing. Both her parents were doctors. By 1974 she had published two well-received novels and was at work on her third. She had done a good deal of foreign travel and spent time writing in an apartment in Bombay with a view of the Arabian Sea. She had many far-flung friends she could drop in on.
Prose catastrophized good news. Here is her reaction when a publisher called to say that he wanted to publish her first novel:
First I didn’t understand what he was saying; then I didn’t believe it. I leaned against a wall and grabbed the back of a chair. I saw myself falling. I saw broken limbs. I saw crutches, I saw punishment for good fortune beyond anything I deserved.
I wonder how she reacted when her novel “Blue Angel” (2000) was named a finalist for the National Book Award.
If this quarter-life crisis memoir were a stool, the third leg — after Russo’s story and Prose’s own — would be the author’s attempt at a group portrait of her generation, not the baby boomers writ large but a sophisticated subset of them. This material is the least successful. A good deal of tired cultural and political history is given another airing, in the box-ticking manner of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” There are many sentences on the order of “we were very young and very fired up” and “we believed that love was the strongest emotion.”
There are just enough memorable set pieces to keep the reader going. In one of them, Prose runs into the Cockettes, the gender-bending theater troupe, in a San Francisco grocery store. Here were “a half-dozen drag queens, in full beards, feather boas, chest hair and satin gowns,” she writes. “They skittered like butterflies, only louder, maximizing the drama of stuffing family-sized bags of candy corn into their shopping baskets.”
She continues: “Whoever these marvelous creatures were, they were not like anyone in the Harvard English department. I felt dazzled, like Dorothy leaving black-and-white Kansas for a world redecorated in the rainbow pastels of a children’s breakfast cereal.”
The cool gray city of love could always, in a moment, brighten up.
1974: A Personal History | By Francine Prose | Harper | 257 pp. | $27.99
